Marlovian Tragedy: The Play of Dilation.

Troni Y. Grande, Marlovian Tragedy: The Play of Dilation 

Lewisburg, PA and Cranbury NJ: Bucknell University Press. 1999. 221 pp. $38.50. ISBN: 0-8387-5375-4.

Ian McAdam, The Irony of Identity: Self and Imagination in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe 

Newark, DE and Cranbury. NJ: University of Delaware Press. 1999. 283 pp. $43.50. ISBN: 0-87413-665-2.

These two books do not merely concern the same author or appear in the same year (even sharing a publisher); they are written by critics both born in that ominous year 1960 who just happen to teach in that glorious country to the north. Accordingly, both books sustain a debt to Northrop Frye. Following fast on the heels of University of Trent critic Fred B. Tromly's Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization, the works of Ian McAdam and Troni Y. Grande jointly give Canadian Marlovian studies a leading critical mass. Hearty cheers for this.

Both books center on Marlowe's drama, each structuring an argument around analysis of the seven plays, although ordered differently. Nonetheless, Grande opens with a chapter on Hero and Leander and (as we shall see) takes her mythic model from Ovid's Elegies, while McAdam includes a discussion of Marlowe's famous epyllion in a brief conclusion. For the most part, then, both books write from within a conventional twentieth-century Shakespearean template that privileges the plays, allows substantive space to primarily one (great) non-dramatic work, and neglects such masterpieces as "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" and Lucan's First Book, as well as the curious relation that Marlowe's poems might have to his plays.

The two books differ in focus and methodology but touch gently at various points. Both, for instance, examine the genre of tragedy and its inward affect: Grande focuses finally on the effect of genre on the reader, while McAdam focuses centrally on a psychoanalytical expression by the author. Put simply, Grande is a reader-response critic; McAdam, a psychoanalytic one. Specifically attempting to fuse the psychoanalysis of Freud to the deconstruction of Barthes and Derrida (19-20), Grande seeks to "define the distinct pleasure of Marlovian tragedy" by examining the works' "notorious moral ambiguity" in their manipulation of the "moralized structure of tragedy" (13). By contrast, McAdam relies on "the post-Freudian ego psychologists," especially the "self psychology or psychology of the self" advanced by Heinz Kohut (25), who emphasizes the pre-Ocdipal phase of the male psyche and the very un-Freudian (and un-Lacanian) "concept of the integrated self as a 'meaningful' construct" (27). While both books nonetheless carry on the historicist project of the last few decades, Grande locates a distinctly Marlovian tragedic "space" that challenges the "orthodox" politic al and social structures that contain his art (16; see 23). By contrast, McAdam locates Marlovian tragedy in the equally compelling space between orthodox Augustinian theology (with its emphasis on divine agency) and newer modes of Renaissance self-assertion (15-17). If Grande's Marlowe is a hedonist author affirmatively committed to the pleasures of this world and of his audience, McAdam's Marlowe is a religious individual tragically caught between competing modes of agency.

Each book presents a compelling and original argument about "Marlovian tragedy." Readers interested in this topic will want to read soon especially the introductions to both books. Grande argues that "each play, as well as Hero and Leander, repeatedly evokes the reader's expectations of a tragic end only to defer them, dilating the moment of pleasure so that the protagonists can dally before the 'law' of tragedy" (13). Thereby, she hopes to "illuminate the ambiguous effects that readers have long associated with Marlowe's signature" (13). To Harry Levin's myths of Icarus and Phaeton as types of overreacher (or Tromly's Tantalus), Grande superbly offers "the image of Zeus holding back the horses of the night, doubling a night of pleasure with his beloved and preventing the arrival of the sober daylight realities of duty, order, and reason" (14). For Grande, "this image functions as a mise-en-abyme, a miniature embedded narrative, that encapsulates Marlowe's own dilatory technique" (14). Dr. Faustus' famous re casting of Ovid's line in the Amores (1.13.14), "O lente lente currite noctis equi!" (19.143), is thus "the epiphanic moment of Marlovian tragedy" (108). Indebted to Patricia Parker and others, Grande suggests that the "Marlovian interplay between the ends of the law and dilation ... may help account for the current split in Marlowe criticism" (14): "Dilation is the rhetorical technique that allows Marlowe to inhabit the borderland of the law" (15). For Marlowe, "dilation thus signifies a space of dalliance, wantonness, or release before the final judgment of tragedy comes to cut down the protagonist and mete out an orthodox retribution" (16). This argument is significant because it reveals how "Marlowe's texts attempt to master the trauma of loss": "Marlovian pleasure functions as a kind of detour from the straight path that leads to death" (20).

To this argument, Grande offers a thoughtful chapter-by-chapter model for tracking the "perverse rhythm of Marlovian tragedy" (22). Chapter 1 uses Hero and Leander as a "test case to introduce dilation as a rhetorical technique with an erotic effect on the reader" (22). Chapters 2-5 "outline a typology of Marlovian dilation on various levels -- generic, linguistic, temporal, and ritual," with the rhetorical comprehending all four (23), for "dilation mounts a resistance to the law on all these levels, defying the authority of sanctioned genres and dead languages, resisting the mastery of time, undoing the rites of purification and sacrifice" (23). Grande justifies her separation of these levels by observing that "each play emphasizes a different aspect of dilation": Tamburlaine, the generic aspect, by "setting the conventions of heroic romance against those of de casibus tragedy"; Dido and Dr. Faustus, the linguistic, by presenting "the protagonists' lawless pleasures as a vernacular evasion of the Latin law of tragedy"; Edward II, the temporal, "set against contracting images of Time the Destroyer"; and The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris, the ritual, "a parodic repetition of the scapegoating ritual" (23).

Grande's argument is to be commended for situating its historical importance in terms of the ideas of Roland Barthes and Frank Kermode: "the need to establish fictional closure corresponds to a deep-rooted (religious) need to build an apocalyptic frame around history, to ward off the forces of chaos, and yet [quoting Kermode] 'the interest of having our expectations falsified is obviously related to our wish to reach the discovery or recognition by an unexpected and instructive route"' (23). Throughout his short canon, "Marlowe reveals an Ovidian impulse to rein in time, to master not pleasure but rather the death sentence of tragedy itself" (24).

While Grande's thesis and map for the canon are important, I find her subsequent chapters to be less compelling than her introduction. The chapter on Tamburlaine, for example, starts more than once, includes repetition, does not move forward clearly, and gets moored in voicing well-known information (such as on the de casibus tradition). Yet here -- and throughout -- we discover fine local detail: "Zenocrate's thrice-repeated imperative, 'Behold the Turk and his great emperess,' may ... remind Marlowe's reader of the prologue's indelible command, ... 'View but his picture"' (57). While Grande might have economized her study more to highlight her originality, her principle of "Ovidian dilation" (27) is nonetheless an exciting contribution, not merely to Marlowe studies, but to studies of the Renaissance Ovid.

McAdam in Irony of Identity might agree with Grande that Marlowe is a "profoundly ironic writer" (21). Against such orthodox structures as Augustinian grace, he argues, "Marlowe seems to be searching for or testing strategies of self-authorization that may become, in a radically changing society, personally and socially legitimate" (22). Whereas recent criticism (Greenblatt, Belsey, Dollimore) has "overemphasized the negative other as a kind of central principle of our social interaction and organization, as well as our critical methodology" (23), McAdam emphasizes Marlowe's heroic and affirmative struggle for selfhood: "we have recently vastly underestimated the role of individual ethical and moral choice, and individual responsibility, in the process of personal and social self-fashioning" (24). Accordingly, the "emphasis in the plays is. . . on the internal anxieties involved in the striving toward successful self-integration": "what they tend to subvert are ideologies and belief systems -- primarily relig ious ones -- that interfere with the project of achieving 'manliness' or personal cohesiveness." The plays, then, "are heterodox in their treatment of traditional religious doctrine, but orthodox in their exposure of human limitation. The project of legitimate or practical self-fashioning is disrupted in the plays by a fantasy of absolute control" (24). Thus, Marlowe's "critique of religion. . . involve[s] a more general attempt to free human consciousness from any sense of spiritual dependency" (31).

To this religious conflict, McAdam adds a sexual one, as Marlowe responds to "the demand inherent in the traditional male role to be consistently strong, heroic, and assertive," a role so burdensome that the male psyche longs for "self surrender, the opportunity to be weak" -- to "long, in fact, for a Christian heaven" (35). Objecting to recent studies of Marlowe's homoeroticism, McAdam believes "that Marlowe only gradually recognized or admitted homosexual desires as he matured, without ever fully embracing their reality" (39).

McAdam concludes that "Marlowe's central artistic vision is a realization of the individual's responsibility for his own self-fashioning, but always with a concomitant awareness that such a self is ultimately illusory" (42-43). "What remains disturbing," McAdam adds in his conclusion, is "that in the self's weakness God's strength does not appear to be guaranteed, contrary to the biblical promise": "What remains so deeply compelling...is the very human need for a self-fulfilling rather than self-destroying love" (234).

Engagingly, McAdam sustains a dialogue with critics of various post-structuralist persuasions. I admire his independence from all of them. Moreover, unlike some psychoanalytic critics, he remains sensitive to the danger of his methodology (26), and readers will appreciate his earnest drive to create a valid space for non-materialist, psychoanalytic commentary on Marlowe. While polemical, he nonetheless balances courtesy with humility and he orders all with a calm strength that commands authority. McAdam's attention to the Augustinian basis of Marlovian drama is invaluable; hopefully, it will inspire further work.

In their quite different projects, McAdam and Grande share what may be a larger generational project, especially intense at the end of the twentieth century, and fruitful to entertain in the classroom (I'm thinking of Robert Watson's The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance or Michael Neill's Issues of Death: Mortality and identity in English Renaissance Tragedy): by viewing the tragedic works of late-sixteenth-century writers such as Marlowe (or Shakespeare), critics discover powerful and competing artistic strategies -- the play of dilation, the work of self-assertion -- for contending with the problem of death in this... our joyful age of grave crisis.